Nobody Wins the Trucking Insurance Market — Not Even the Insurers

A trucking company's insurance bill is now the fastest-growing line on its income statement, and almost nobody downstream of that bill is better off for it.▸ Juries are handing out bigger verdicts against carriers. Insurers are raising premiums to cover those verdicts — and still losing money. Carriers are passing the cost through until they can't, and then they close. The jobs that used to sit behind the wheel are the ones that disappear.

A "nuclear verdict" is trade-press shorthand for a jury award of $10 million or more against a corporate defendant.▸ The U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform tracked 1,288 of them between 2013 and 2022 alone, with a median award of $21 million — and auto-accident cases, which include most trucking crashes, are one of the three case types that make up two-thirds of the total. The report documents individual trucking cases directly: a $411.7 million verdict against a carrier in Florida in 2020, after a driver crashed into a truck stopped in an emergency lane behind a 45-car pileup, and a $1 billion verdict against two trucking companies in August 2021, after a semi rear-ended stopped traffic and killed a teenage driver.

The count fell off a cliff in 2020 only because courthouses shut down; it was back near a record by 2022.▸ A separate, more recent count using a different tracking method — Marathon Strategies' 2025 report — found 135 nuclear verdicts nationwide in 2024 alone, totaling $31.3 billion, and 49 "thermonuclear" verdicts of $100 million or more, up 81% from 2023. Trucking and automotive cases together accounted for 15 of 2024's biggest awards, worth more than $1.4 billion, including a $160 million verdict against a truck manufacturer over a 2022 rollover and a $450 million punitive-damages verdict against a trailer maker (later reduced to $108 million on appeal).

Those verdicts land somewhere: on the insurers who write commercial truck liability policies.▸ For the 14th consecutive year, the U.S. commercial auto insurance line posted an industry-wide underwriting loss in 2024 — $4.9 billion, according to AM Best, bringing the two-year total above $10 billion. Insurers are not padding margins with the rate increases carriers complain about; they are still losing money on the line even after raising rates.

Those rate increases are real and compounding.▸ The American Transportation Research Institute found that motor-carrier liability insurance premiums hit a record 10.2¢ per mile in 2024 — up 3.0% from 2023, which itself had jumped 12.5% over 2022. For a truck running 100,000 miles a year, that is roughly $10,200 in liability premium alone, before physical-damage coverage, cargo coverage, or anything else. Carriers that can't absorb it either raise rates on shippers, drop excess coverage and gamble on never having a serious accident, or shut down.

The clearest sign of that last option is the workforce.▸ Truck transportation employment peaked in October 2022 and has fallen in most months since, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics payroll data — a decline of roughly 122,000 jobs, or 7.7% of the workforce, through June 2026. Most of the carriers that have failed in this stretch are small: fleets of fewer than ten trucks that can least afford a nuclear verdict, an excess-policy nonrenewal, or a single year without hauling enough freight to cover a premium that has outpaced freight rates.

The insurance and litigation costs are not the only pressure on trucking employment — freight demand has been soft over the same period — but they sit on top of it as a fixed cost that does not fall when freight volumes do, squeezing exactly the small carriers that have the least room to absorb a bad year.

This piece covers commercial trucking liability insurance and does not address personal auto insurance, which BlackLeaf has covered separately.